Tuesday, October 1, 2013

“Mind over matter” has been a saying that was left for
mystics and believers of supernatural phenomena. However, with a new break
through in bio medical technology, thoughts now have a direct causal reaction
to physical objects.

A team of biomedical engineers led by Levi Hargrove at the
Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago in Illinois reported a noteworthy break
through in the New England Journal of
Medicine. The patient that you see in the video above is a 32 year-old man
whose knee and lower leg were amputated in 2009 after a motorcycle
accident. The prosthetic leg that
you see, isn’t the standard grade prosthetic, but is wired directly into the
patient’s muscles giving him full control over his prosthetic simply by thinking
about moving his leg. In a sense, hijacking the signal that would be sent down
the hamstring and to the missing foot.

The major advancement in this technology is that the patient
no longer requires a remote-control switch or exaggerated movements to tell the
robotic leg to execute a certain movement.

“To our knowledge, this is the first time that neural signals
have been used to control both a motorized knee and ankle prosthesis,”
According to Hargrove.

In past experiments of robotic prosthetics researchers have
shown that individuals that were paralyzed could move a robotic arm using their
thoughts such as Matt Nagle, the first person to control an artificial handusing a BCI as part of the first nine-month human trial of Cyberkinestic’s
BrainGate chip-implant. What separates the technology that Matt used and our
current prosthetic user is that instead of using a typical BCI, it uses
the muscle signals to amplify the messages sent by the brain when the person wants
to move.

“In order to use muscles as amplifiers to surgeons redirect
the nerves that previously controlled a part of the patient’s lower leg muscles
so that they would cause the muscles in his thigh to contract in a technique
called targeted muscle reinnervation. “ – Nature

They then used the sensors that were embedded in the robotic
leg to calculate the electrical pulse created by the reinnervated muscle
contraction and the existing thigh muscles. When researchers combined all of
this data with the additional information from the sensors, the patient was
able to use the prostatic more accurately than when attempting to control the
leg with its sensor alone.

Researchers hope that within the next three to five years
this technology should be available to the public to help give mobility back to
people who have lost a limb.